2003-04-27 04:00:00 PDT Los Angeles -- When brunette Rachel York strides into a conference room, she's the last person you'd think of as Lucille Ball. But within minutes, it's clear why York was chosen to play the famous redhead in "Lucy." Quoting a line from the TV movie that re-creates a famous "I Love Lucy" episode, York suddenly begins speaking a half-octave higher and squawks "Ya can't shoot a moving target, so when he comes in I'll say, 'OK, Ricky, what seems to the trouble between us?' "

The impression is eerily pitch-perfect. "I'm kind of an empath," says York, "I do impressions and I pick up people's mannerisms, their gestures, their voice -- if I hang around with them long enough it just kind of rubs off on me. "

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York was no "I Love Lucy" expert when she was called in to audition for the role, so she was thrown off when producers asked her to reproduce one of the redhead's best known sitcom skits. "They wanted me to improvise 'Vita-meata- vegemin,' I hadn't seen that since I was 2!"

"There are those people who have studied her shows, and now I am one of those people. Having watched every single 'I Love Lucy' episode over and over and over again, I know every nuance, every turn of the head."

If York lacked complete mastery of the "Lucy" oeuvre, she more than made up for it with a gift for physical comedy she'd developed while playing "Norma" in the Broadway production of Blake Edward's "Victor/Victoria."

"Blake freed me up to explore and experiment and do all these crazy things on stage, and that's where I really got to explore the medium intensely."

HOURS OF PREPARATION

To prepare for the three-hour movie, which traces Ball's early career and tumultuous 20-year marriage to Cuban-born musician/entrepreneur Desi Arnaz (played by Danny Pino), after York landed the role, she embarked on a crash course in all things Lucy, starting with the nearly 40 B-movies Ball made in the '30s and '40s. "When I watched her old films I was really impressed because she was a chameleon and was quite a dramatic actress. Lucy is not known for that, but every character she did was quite different from the next."

York also read a memoir that Ball has stashed, unpublished, in her attic. "After Lucy died her daughter found the manuscript and salvaged it and put it together. Lucy didn't want to publish it because she didn't want to say anything bad about Desi, because she did write about the cheating. Perhaps she felt it was a cathartic exercise and just wanted to leave it at that. But reading her autobiography was very helpful because I was able to hear Lucy's own words."

While "Lucy" touches on Ball's early career, it's her complicated relationship with Arnaz that provides the TV movie's emotional undertow. Ball married the handsome bandleader in 1940. Arnaz began philandering almost immediately and made no secret about it. Why did Ball put up with the infidelity for so long? Says York, "They fought a lot, and they loved a lot. Maybe to a certain extent they loved to fight, because there was something very passionate and fun and sexy about the whole thing. And I also think the making up was a high for them."

Additionally, Ball was a family-first kind of woman, says York. "Her main intention throughout her whole life was keeping the family together. I think that's why she couldn't just throw him away. She had to give it her best shot. She finally realized Desi wasn't going to change, that it was now affecting her reputation, and that it might be best for both of them -- but even then she still had some resistance."

As portrayed in the movie, Arnaz seduced Ball after she'd served him with divorce papers the first time. "She was a pushover!" York laughs.

But if Ball and Arnaz suffered turmoil in their personal lives together, their professional partnership produced moments of pure slapstick bliss during the six-year run of "I Love Lucy." And for that, fans can thank Buster Keaton. The aging comedian took Ball under his wing when both were marginally employed contract players at MGM in the mid-'40s.

"A lot of times Keaton and Lucy and Red Skelton would go into some studio warehouse that wasn't being used -- they weren't supposed to be doing this -- and they'd just play around and be silly and put on little shows for (the stagehands). They were just doing it for the love of it, the art of it."

It was Keaton who taught Ball to try out faces and gestures in front of a mirror. Years later she would practice her routines for each episode alone, without the aid of a director. "Lucy liked to start from zero each time and work out all the details on her own," says York. "That's why, when they had rehearsals early in the week, Lucy wasn't very interesting. If they were to judge her from the table readings, they'd say 'get rid of that girl, she's awful.' "

'WORKING OUT THE KINKS'

York believes Ball needed to master the mechanics before she could properly conjure the comedic spirit of the piece. "I don't think Lucy's comedy was about looking in the mirror and figuring out how to tilt her head and lift her elbow, but in doing that you just get closer and closer to the truth. She was working out the kinks, smoothing out the technical pieces (of movement) so she could be free to tell the truth."

As much as Ball obsessed on preparing the perfect screwball sequence, York believes it was live performance that provided the comedienne with a balm rarely experienced in the rest of her life.

"Lucy didn't really have a spiritual outlet," says York. "She was not religious. But everybody needs some kind of spiritual outlet in their lives, and I think for Lucy it was performing. In her real life, she had a lot of fear and paranoia and distrust, and she didn't have anything to nurture her spiritually. I think the spotlight was her spirituality, where she could shine and be free."